vida Kirtland’s JET fuel PLUME
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March 2014 13
AQUIFER AT RISK The fuel contamination has three parts: • A vapor plume that is the result of the fuel volatilizing into the ground in the vadose zone—the ground that is not saturated with water between the surface and the top of the water table, which in this case is about 500 feet deep;
MICHAEL JENSEN, MIDDLE RIO GRANDE PROJECTS DIRECTOR, AMIGOS BRAVOS he Kirtland Air Force Base (KAFB) Bulk Fuels Facility (BFF) jet fuel plume has been estimated to be as much as 24 million gallons, the largest toxic spill into a public water supply in US history. By contrast, the Exxon Valdez tanker spill was officially listed as about 11 million gallons. BY
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How It Happened In the early 1950s, KAFB constructed what is now referred to as the Bulk Fuel Facility to replace a system whose tanks and pipes had been leaking for some time. The BFF consisted of two multi-million gallon storage tanks and a network of underground and above ground piping and various fuel dispensing structures. In 2012, KAFB concluded that, “The exact history of releases is unknown,” and has insisted that it only became aware of a problem at the BFF in 1999 when staff reported that the ground was visibly saturated over a large area. However, internal documents acquired by Citizen Action (www.radfreenm.org) show that: • KAFB has not and perhaps cannot provide evidence of complying with Air Force requirements for system testing and inspection before 1985; • KAFB knew in 1985 that BFF pipes would fail required pressure tests so the Air Force issued them a waiver then and again in 1994; required repairs, 5-year pressure tests and annual inspections were never done by KAFB; • In the early 1990s, visible contamination and more than 100 soil samples in the vicinity of the BFF pump house led to it being declared a Solid Waste Management Unit but KAFB did not investigate further; • The EPA began identifying contaminated sites across KAFB in the 1980s and identified serious fuel contamination in 1998 and ordered KAFB to conduct tests to begin characterizing the nature of the problem, but this work is still ongoing. The Plume After more than 15 years of “characterization,” nobody knows with certainty the extent of the plume—either horizontally or vertically, the amount of fuel discharged into the ground, or how quickly the plume is moving toward the Ridgecrest and Burton drinking well fields.
WANTED: A PROVEN CLEAN-UP TECHNOLOGY and FUNDS for QUICK, EFFECTIVE TREATMENT • The Light Non-Aqueous Phase Liquid (LNAPL) that runs from the surface through the vadose zone to the water table, where it co-exists with water in differing concentrations in the pore network within the aquifer (the spaces between soil grains); it does not “float on top of the water” as many people put it and does not dissolve into the water; this area is estimated to be 1/2 mile long and about 1,000 ft. wide; • A dissolved-phase plume made up of chemicals that leach out of the LNAPL and dissolve into the water, the most important of which is ethylene dibromide (EDB, a fuel additive); this dissolved chemical plume is estimated to be about 1 1/3 miles long and 1,000 ft. wide. What Is Being Done The New Mexico Environment Department (www. nmenv.state.nm.us/NMED/Issues/KirtlandAFBFuels. html), under Secretary-designate Ryan Flynn and Environmental Health Division Director Tom Blaine, says that the following projects are being done: • Identify the full scope of the leak (plume characterization); • Conduct certain interim remediation and containment efforts (interim measure);
• Propose and implement a final remedy for soil and groundwater contamination remediation. Serious questions about the usefulness of this activity remain; • According to independent experts, there are continued data gaps, ongoing problems with field measurements, insufficient and inadequate monitoring wells, and an inadequate conceptual model of the site—all making full characterization of the site impossible and hence limiting the ability to develop appropriate and effective responses; • To date, the only activity done to contain, reduce, or mitigate the plume has been a process called soil vapor extraction (SVE), which is a series of extraction wells drilled into the vapor plume that act essentially like vacuums to draw fuel vapors from the LNAPL and burn them off as fuel for the SVE units; there have been extensive delays in getting the SVE system installed, frequent interruptions because units break down or cannot run at full capacity, not nearly enough SVE units in relation to the problem, the performance of the SVE systems is not being evaluated correctly, to date only a few tens of thousands of “gallon equivalents” have been removed from a 24million gallon spill, and SVE does not halt the LNAPL from further sinking down to the groundwater and releasing more dissolved chemicals, like EDB; • Furthermore, use of SVE has been made largely irrelevant now because the water table has risen over the last few years due to less groundwater pumping and now encapsulates most of the LNAPL, meaning there is much less opportunity for vapors to volatilize into the vadose zone and be pulled out of the ground; the Air Force reported in June 2012 that the trapped fuel, “Will be an ongoing source of dissolved groundwater contamination indefinitely.”; • The extremely large size of this contamination and its depth strongly suggest that the proposed cleanup activities—and perhaps any standard remediation technologies—will not be enough to clean up the plume in time before it reaches the ABCWUA wells in 10-20 years (estimates vary); • The consultant for the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control), in a public meeting to discuss the public health implications of the jet fuel plume, acknowledged that there is no known technology for treating the large volumes of water produced at the impacted wells. At least publicly, the NMED and ABCWUA remain hopeful that something can be done to remediate the jet fuel plume in all its phases: soil vapor, LNAPL and EDB dissolved plume. It seems that one conclusion to draw from the scope and scale of the jet fuel plume and the impact this has on being able to treat it effectively and quickly enough is that the ABCWUA and the public should focus their efforts on getting the Air Force to either find (and pay for) a proven treatment technology, so that these well fields can become non-potable sources of water exclusively for outdoor irrigation and identify (and pay for) new well fields that can replace the quantity and quality of water lost. For more information contact Michael Jensen at mjensen@amigosbravos.org.